Scheduled delivery of services, packages, etc., has proven to be the bane of logistics functions for many years. The standard presentation of service providers, for example, of sending an attendant between the hours of, for example, 8 AM and 5 PM, and the like, has left many a customer frustrated and helpless as such a person becomes a “hostage” and required to await arrival at any time within a wide window. Likewise, package delivery has proven to be difficult as set times are rare to be offered, only dates, and such delivery to a non-present individual has led to many instances of externally placed packages being stolen and/or damaged.
Typical service provider activities are now scheduled and handled either by “warning” calls directly from the attending worker or through a dispatcher providing some basis of prior notification of arrival. Even so, however, such calls may come at a time when the customer is ill-prepared to receive such a visit or even with an emergency creating a delay on the customer end of the operation. In other words, even with such a wide window as an initial service offering, and a prior call to notify the customer that the service provider is “on the way” or planning on arriving within the next thirty minutes (as an example), the customer remains at the mercy of the servicer with little in the way of definitive determinations as to when such a delivery is expected.
This problem, as noted above, remains a distinct difficulty for all parties as the customer is forced to wait without any definitive (or even rough understanding) of the time such a service delivery is expected. The prior call merely shortens the time involved, but the window of expectation remains wide until the dispatcher or provider informs that delivery is in transit (hopefully). Such dispatch activities typically involve a spreadsheet with “on the fly” decisions as to where and when the next delivery should occur.
As alluded to, such deliveries are not limited to services, but goods as well. For instance, demand for large items (furniture, appliances, etc.) for risen as of late, but the delivery schedules for such activities are generally wasteful and poorly planned. For example, with a large truck, a number of large items may be included for a delivery operation. However, logistically, the best practice would seem to be to determine the most efficient route first and stock the truck appropriately with the first delivery at the nearest point of egress and all subsequent deliveries introduced further back, all in order to ensure the delivery person(s) can remove such goods in order of location involved. As it is, such considerations are generally not made until the last minute or the routes themselves are poorly planned (or both). It has not been uncommon that such scheduled goods deliveries are late from a planned time, or missed entirely due to logistical problems. As well, updating customers of planned delivery times are typically made via dispatch and by phone, leaving all parties at the mercy of availability of the parties involved and proper connections being made.
There is thus a significant need to provide a better customer experience with a system that utilizes more effective consumer interaction (through chatbot devices, for instance) and simplified and reliable negotiation and determination of delivery times and dates. To date, the only possible improvements involve, as one example, systems designed primarily to manage carrier capacity in terms of time and distance parameters and physical delivery vehicle capacity measurements, but still through a dispatcher individual. Another system utilizes a website to schedule a large item delivery through selecting carriers dependent upon geography and carrier load capacity, rather than route planning. Such prior and state of the art systems are significantly deficient as it concerns logistics for the delivery provider, particularly in terms of route planning, and fail to simultaneously provide reliable times to meet customer expectations (with pinpointed accuracy). The following disclosure remedies such shortcomings.